Breaking Out of His Pop Prison

Barry Manilow’s Musical ‘Harmony’ to be Revived in Atlanta

Bruce Sussman, left, and Barry Manilow. Their musical, “Harmony,” will begin a monthlong run at the Alliance Theater in Atlanta beginning on Sept. 6.Credit
Chad Batka for The New York Times

Meeting Barry Manilow for the first time comes with all sorts of surprises. For someone who sings big songs in an unapologetically open-lunged manner, Mr. Manilow speaks quietly in interviews, often more mumbling than mellifluous.

Likewise, while he’s known for his smooth demeanor onstage, Mr. Manilow glides a touch gingerly nowadays, the result of hip surgeries — one as recently as last week — and shoulders so square that it appears someone may have accidentally left a coat hanger in his jacket. And while he’s known for sugar in his songs, he can be a little salty in person; he’s from Brooklyn, after all.

But perhaps the biggest surprise about Mr. Manilow, a confirmed master of the soft-rock American standard, is this little fact: despite all his years of gold records and frosted tips, what he’s always really wanted to do is make a first-class Broadway musical.

“I’ve been kind of imprisoned in the pop music world, very happily, but there are these rules that you need to adhere to in pop music,” said Mr. Manilow, mentioning some of his best-known songs about love, loss and hot spots north of Havana. “There is a certain brick wall that you hit. But this gave me the opportunity to go way, way beyond what I’ve been doing for 30 years.”

The result of that artistic stretch is “Harmony,” with a book and lyrics by his longtime collaborator, Bruce Sussman. It’s a show that has been gestating for two decades, including a 1997 run at La Jolla Playhouse in California and a planned 2004 Broadway engagement, which was foiled when its lead producer announced soon before an out-of-town opening that he was millions short of capitalization. Rehearsals ground to a halt, and Mr. Manilow and Mr. Sussman eventually had to fight to wrest back rights for the show.

But Mr. Manilow said he never gave up on “Harmony” — “We tried putting it in the drawer, and it just won’t stay there” — and said he has a simple goal now. “I just want to see it one more time before I croak,” said Mr. Manilow, who’s 70.

Barring unforeseen tragedy, that wish will come true when the Alliance Theater Company in Atlanta presents “Harmony” in a monthlong run beginning Sept. 6, directed by Tony Speciale. Tickets are selling briskly, more evidence of Mr. Manilow’s continued drawing power, something displayed with his successful concerts earlier this year on Broadway. But both he and Mr. Sussman are playing down any suggestion that Atlanta is a tryout.

“We’re just saying thank you very much, come down and see us, we’ll talk to you later,” Mr. Sussman said. “We want to keep the blinders on.”

The long wait between productions seems to have done nothing to dull the two creators’ ardor for “Harmony,” which tells the story of the Comedian Harmonists, a vaudevillian German sextet whose rise to international fame was interrupted by the Nazis rise to power. The group — whose mix of Jewish and non-Jewish performers was anathema to Hitler — has been the subject of several other creative interpretations, including an acclaimed 1997 German film, “The Harmonists,” and a 1999 Broadway musical, “Band in Berlin,” which was much less loved.

Mr. Sussman, 64, said he first came across the Harmonists in 1991, when he saw a documentary that explored their story and left him wanting more. So much so that he flew to Berlin to inspect the archives of the group, and left there with a clear idea of what their tale was about.

“This is a show about the quest for harmony in what turned out to be the most discordant chapter in human history,” Mr. Sussman said.

As for music, Mr. Sussman’s first call was to Mr. Manilow, with whom he had collaborated on the ridiculous, and ridiculously catchy, 1978 hit “Copacabana” and scores of other songs since the two met in the early 1970s. By that time, Mr. Manilow had already written a musical — “The Drunkard,” which ran Off Broadway — and had established his bona fides: born in Brooklyn, he started playing piano in elementary school and attended the Juilliard School before working as an arranger and musical director for Bette Midler. He began recording in the mid-1970s, and has since sold more than 80 million records, and produced for Ms. Midler and Dionne Warwick.

For all of that, though, Mr. Manilow said that when Mr. Sussman first mentioned the Harmonists, it bothered him that he hadn’t heard of them. “They were the architects of the kind of popular singing that we all grew up loving,” Mr. Manilow said, mentioning groups like the Manhattan Transfer and Take 6. “They were huge. How’d did we miss these guys?”

Photo

Barry Manilow at rehearsals in New York for the musical “Harmony.” The show, which will open for a run in Atlanta next month, was produced at La Jolla Playhouse in California in 1997.Credit
Chad Batka for The New York Times

The 1997 production — which came in at three hours — received mixed reviews. Some critics faulted Mr. Sussman, while others dissed the more famous Mr. Manilow. “It’s a solid show, impeccably staged and performed,” wrote Charles Isherwood, in 1997, for Variety, “whose major disappointment is the contribution of Manilow, its marquee name.”

Still, in 2003, it looked as if “Harmony” would finally get a fuller production. Rehearsals were under way in New York and a theater in Philadelphia was prepped for a pre-Broadway tryout. And then the money ran out.

At the time, Mr. Manilow referred to the cancellation as a “colossal blunder.” But last year, he called Mr. Sussman and asked if he would consider taking another shot. Soon, they were calling regional theaters, including the Alliance, whose main number they say they looked up in the phone book.

Once they got past the receptionist, Susan V. Booth, the theater’s artistic director, was less circumspect. She had kept tabs on the progress of “Harmony” over the years and was intrigued by its premise. More recently, she’d heard a demo of the show sung by Mr. Manilow. So, she said, “It wasn’t a long line to ‘yes’ ” when the two called.

Mr. Manilow was stunned by the quick booking — Mr. Sussman recalls him calling in a happy, profanity-enhanced reverie after the conversation with Ms. Booth — but there was work to done, including landing a creative team. With a background in plays and classics, Mr. Speciale may have seemed an unorthodox choice for the new production, but he said the job was the result of an instant connection at an interview last fall. “I felt like I had known these guys my entire life,” he said.

Despite the earlier production, Mr. Speciale said he approached “Harmony” as a new musical rather than a revival, cutting almost an hour. And while Mr. Manilow’s songs may not be synonymous with deep thoughts, Mr. Speciale said audiences would be surprised if they expected many songs like “Mandy,” or other entries in his adult contemporary canon.

“It’s not a golden age musical that has a sort of fluff ending,” Mr. Speciale said. “It’s about real people, and it tells their rise to success, but also the things that eventually tore them apart. I don’t know if that’s surprising. But its what’s rewarding to work on.”

Mr. Sussman echoed that. “One of the most joyful parts of this for me is that everyone else gets to see the Barry that I know and that I’ve known all these years,” he said, adding that “the general public tends to think of him in one way.”

That said, Mr. Manilow seems open to questions about his image. His visage seems to have — how to put this? — adapted over the years, and he admits to having some minor plastic surgery in the 1990s, as well as some Botox shots, though he says he stopped those before the millennium dawned, saying they didn’t work. And while steroids ease his hip pain — he had major surgery in 2011 — they cause his face to swell.

In a recent rehearsal, Mr. Manilow stood at the piano, giving notes on an actor’s key and the phrasings of songs, while sucking on an electronic cigarette. His eyes deeply set behind spectacles and his teeth preternaturally white — there’s a kind of cool crocodile vibe to Mr. Manilow — he listened intently as his cast worked its way through “How Can I Serve You, Madame?,” a waltz that includes references to Hamlet, falsetto singing and complex harmonies. In short, Top 40 it wasn’t.

Indeed, Mr. Manilow said the songs in “Harmony” had to be “more authentic” than other things he’d written in his career, one that began many years ago in Brooklyn, with an eye always cast toward Broadway.

“This is not anything new for me,” he said. “This is what I’ve loved to do ever since I was a kid.”

Then he added: “I know how to do it. I just have never been asked to do it.”

A version of this article appears in print on August 18, 2013, on Page AR4 of the New York edition with the headline: Breaking Out of His Pop Prison. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe